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The secret art in Dorothy Ball and Adam Campagna’s 1910 New Orleans Craftsman is a plaster-over-tin frieze titled The Vengeance of Achilles. It depicts Achilles dragging Hector’s body and hangs above the piano, hidden behind a large painting by Ball’s father, artist Mac Ball. The painting is suspended on rings and slides aside, turning an unsettling inherited feature into an unexpected party trick.
What is the secret art in this 1910 New Orleans Craftsman?
The Vengeance of Achilles is a menacing frieze made from plaster over tin. Its scene comes from the aftermath of the Trojan War: Achilles drags the body of Hector. In the house, the frieze is positioned above the piano in the living room, where visitors ordinarily see Mac Ball’s large painting instead.
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Mac Ball solved the visual problem by painting a large picture that covers the frieze. The picture hangs from rings, allowing it to slide sideways and expose the scene behind it. The reveal is playful in execution, even though the underlying image is, as the feature describes it, “horrible.”
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How does the painting hide the frieze?
The covering artwork is not permanently fixed over the wall. It is suspended on rings and can be moved aside, so the original frieze remains physically present and accessible. The published tour does not state the hardware manufacturer, load rating, dimensions or installation method. Anyone adapting the idea for another artwork would need to evaluate the actual painting’s weight, wall construction and clearances rather than assume the house’s arrangement can be copied directly.
A 1910 Craftsman shaped by dark wood and art glass
The four-bedroom house is credited to New Orleans architects Favrot & Livaudais. Its defining interior materials are deeply hued cypress paneling and original art-glass windows. Ball grew up around the city’s bright, high-ceilinged houses and found this home strikingly different. “But this was so different because of the darkness and the wood,” she says.
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That darkness is not a decorative backdrop added for the current owners; it is part of the house’s inherited character. The cypress absorbs and warms the rooms, while the art glass supplies color and pattern without making the interiors feel bright in the conventional sense. Designer Whitney Parris-Lamb summarized the challenge this way: “The brown stone and dark wood-paneled rooms absorb so much light and color.”
Ball has five generations of family roots in New Orleans and works at the Historic New Orleans Collection on art books concerning the collection and Gulf South culture. Campagna runs a charter school in the French Quarter. Their approach treats the house as a family and civic artifact as much as a residence: existing wood, windows, furniture and art are kept in conversation rather than replaced by a single new style.
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Why the renovation focused on cohesion instead of erasure
A 2017 renovation had left some rooms stylistically mismatched and, in Parris-Lamb’s view, removed character the owners valued. The later design team included Brooklyn-based Jesse Parris-Lamb, co-founded by Whitney Parris-Lamb and Amanda Jesse; architect Office La; and contractor Mars Millwork. Their task was to connect the rooms and make new work feel answerable to the original fabric.
The living room had previously been created by combining two rooms. Gray-painted walls and inexpensive white built-ins worked against the cypress and the collected furnishings. The redesign replaced that disjointed feeling with details that acknowledge the architecture. Tiny lights were set between the ceiling beams in a reflective, “starlight-style” plan, giving the dark room points of illumination without flattening its atmosphere.
The team also added a primary bathroom and a small mudroom. A kitchen overhaul was described as a future plan, not a completed part of this renovation, so the finished tour should not be read as documentation of a newly rebuilt kitchen.
Parris-Lamb calls the house’s negotiation between old and new its central narrative: “For me, that’s the story of this house.” The phrase applies as much to the concealed Achilles as to the millwork and lighting. The goal was not to make every room match, but to let interventions reinforce what was already distinctive.
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Room by room: the collected interior
Family pieces and contemporary acquisitions are distributed throughout the house. The following details are reported in the 2025 home tour; they document the rooms as photographed and described then, not current retail availability.
| Room | Reported furnishings, finishes and artwork |
|---|---|
| Living room | Family-owned vintage sofas reupholstered in Elitis fabric; a 1940s tiger-oak coffee table; 1970s Scandinavian pine armchairs; a Richard Serra work; Benjamin Moore In Your Eyes on the ceiling; tiny lights between the beams; a family-owned Knoll wall unit and Parsons side table; Mac Ball artwork; and the concealed Achilles frieze above the piano. |
| Music room | Wood-beamed ceiling, archival stained-glass windows, a Mac Ball acrylic on canvas, a work by Joan Hernández Pijuan, Knoll lounge chairs and an Armadillo rug. |
| Dining room | De La Espada Twenty-Five dining table, vintage Dutch chairs, vintage Chinese sideboard, Ruemmler pendant, Allied Maker sconce, Christopher Farr rug, Kantha quilt and a Mac Ball acrylic on board. |
| Sunroom | Farrow & Ball Lichen paint, an antique table and chair, a vintage rug and an Original BTC Cobb large pendant. |
| Powder room | Atelier De Troupe Alice sconce, vintage mirror and Trustworth Studios Tokio HB wallpaper. |
| Primary bath | Heath Ceramics Olive #1 tile; Benjamin Moore White Blush walls; Farrow & Ball Wimborne White ceiling; a Hiroshige II woodblock print; an antique chair and a family-owned vintage rug. |
Studio Four NYC’s Lucia Stripe appears more than once, used for a café curtain and again on a bedroom panel. That repetition gives the house a quiet visual thread without requiring every room to share the same furniture or paint.
Family objects make the house feel inhabited across generations
The interior’s continuity comes less from a matching furniture set than from provenance. The living room’s vintage sofas belonged to the family and were reupholstered for continued use. Knoll cabinets came from Ball’s grandfather, and a small side table was made by Campagna’s grandfather. Those objects sit alongside newer interventions rather than being isolated as museum pieces.
Mac Ball’s work appears in the living room, dining room, music room and inglenook. His presence is therefore both artistic and architectural: he supplied the painting that conceals the frieze, while other works establish a recurring family voice around the house. In the music room, his acrylic on canvas shares space with Joan Hernández Pijuan; in the dining room, an acrylic on board hangs among vintage furniture and contemporary lighting.
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The arrangement also explains why removing the Achilles would have been more complicated than taking down an unattractive decoration. The frieze is part of the building’s story, and the covering painting is part of the family’s response to it. Keeping both allows the owners to acknowledge the original feature without requiring it to dominate daily life.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why preserving an unsettling feature matters here
Ball’s response is practical and deliberately superstitious: “You never want to rip this thing out that somebody else might love. Don’t anger the house gods!” The remark recognizes that an old house contains evidence of earlier tastes, even when those tastes are difficult to share.
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It also avoids claiming more than the available record supports. The home-tour feature reports the owner’s confirmation with museum colleagues, but it does not establish who made the frieze, when it was installed beyond its reported connection to the original house, or what conservation treatment it may need. Its significance here is experiential and architectural: a startling image survives inside a Craftsman whose owners decided that survival was preferable to erasure.
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The contrast that gives the house its atmosphere
The most effective rooms balance three kinds of contrast. First is Ball’s remembered brightness versus the actual darkness of cypress and art glass. Second is historic fabric versus the traces of the 2017 renovation, including the gray walls and white built-ins that had obscured the house’s character. Third is the choice to preserve the Achilles rather than remove it.
Those contrasts are specific to this property, not a universal formula for New Orleans interiors. The designers worked with the particular absorption of the brown stone and wood, the existing beams, the stained glass and the family’s accumulated furnishings. The result is less a period reconstruction than a layered interior in which old materials, inherited art and carefully placed new elements can all remain legible.
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The memorable detail is not simply that a grim classical scene exists behind a painting. It is that the owners made room for conflicting reactions: discomfort at the image, affection for the house, respect for an original feature and delight in a reveal that can surprise guests. The sliding canvas turns the frieze into a secret without pretending it never existed.
In this 1910 Craftsman, the hidden artwork is therefore inseparable from the larger design decision. Dark cypress, original art glass, family furniture and Mac Ball’s paintings all remain in place because the renovation sought continuity rather than a blank slate. The house’s most theatrical moment works precisely because the people living there chose to keep the thing that first seemed easiest to remove.
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